DISCLAIMER: this is my first writeup on Flitetest, so if I screw it up or you want to know more about what I did, please let me know about it anyway you can find to reach me. Also I live in Switzerland now but was in California when I got into the hobby. If you see me with equipment you can't procure in the US (mainly the Multiplex 2.4 M-Link TX/RX) that's why.
I've been a long time DLG pilot, but since I relocated to a city by a lake I couldn't really find thermals near home to fly in after work. I started getting a float-plane, which is fun. But in winter it's too cold to swim and retrieve if something goes wrong. Then I started watching David, the Joshes and Chad playing around with multicopters...
I was really impressed by the work of Jake_Wells with the boxcopter. He built it as a quad which is fine. But I wanted something to build that would be as cheap as possible. I had available 3 tiny Hobbyking C1826 2400kV motors with matching TowerPro Mag8 12A ESCs. So I started looking around for what I'd need and what I could scrounge up. Found a servo in the mix, so tricopter it was.
Bought a square-ish tupperware at the local mall, a really small steel hinge and some 18x10mm spruce. I spent the equivalent of maybe $13 in materials. Had a piece of 20x50mm spruce stock lying around. So I screwed in the arms onto a square piece of the bigger stock inside the tupperware. Really nothing more. No glue no nothing, 3 screws with a bit of CA to act as lock-tite.
Here's what the central "pod" looks like: (yes, that's my DLG on the right)
After futzing around with eCalc a bit I got a good number of 5x3 props from HobbyKing, a Nanowii FC, along with a couple of LED strips as you'll see in the videos. The power comes from a 3S 2200mAh from the LHS. Reprogrammed the Nanowii with Multiwii on arduino pretty easily (then again I programmed arduinos for a professional project before, nothing complex to me there). Just made sure to flash it in tricopter mode and voila. Didn't even bother adjusting the PIDs, the defaults fly good enough for me to learn with. Enough with the talk, here's the first video:
You'll notice I still have a few bugs, especially at take-off - the motors start and stop in sequence instead of all at once. Then occasionally one of them stops mid-flight (thus the crash-landing in both clips). I'm still hunting for the cause of those, though I suspect bad wiring/soldering on my part may be the most likely culprit. And here is the second video, flying at night:
I hope to find an explanation to the issues I have, and show how even tiny motors can fly a 600g machine. Last crash landing broke the tupperware, so I'll be replacing that, but they're cheap to come by and eventually I'll be emulating the Boxcopter and landing on water I hope! I'll be writing about future developments as I have the time.
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